But more important is what's in the store. Developers have been working since February's Consumer Preview release to prepare a new batch of Metro-styled apps, with everything from games to newsreaders making the cut. Microsoft has even rounded up some of the best into a section called "Great apps for Release Preview." This collection includes TuneIn Radio, Box, Cocktail Flow, Allrecipes, Wikipedia, Music Maker Jam, and Kindle, in addition to three games: FitBall, Cut The Rope, and Pirates Love Daisies. These aren't all particularly inspired choices, but they do shed some light on how Microsoft thinks third-party Metro development should look.

The three featured games run pretty much as you might expect—fullscreen and devoid of any Metro styling. It's the remainder of the apps in the collection that are most interesting, and it's clear Microsoft is focused on making many users' first impression of the OS a visually striking one. Cocktail Flow, for example, is the best looking of the bunch. The app lists a number of popular cocktails, including recipes and required ingredients, with big photo representations for visual browsing. You can also add liquors and ingredients you own to your virtual bar, which filters potential recipes based on the liquors you have on hand. It's not an app with a lot of depth, but it perfectly encapsulates the sort of bold visual styling Microsoft hopes other developers will employ.

Enlarge/ Just in time for your Windows 8 Launch Party, Cocktail Flow will teach you how to mix your own drinks.

Surprisingly, the official Wikipedia app is another visually striking inclusion. The app opens not on encyclopedic text, but big, tiled pictures that link to related entries. Scrolling further to the left reveals a grid of featured articles and historical events that happened on this day. There is, however, a noticeable lack of polish when reading specific pages—arguably the feature that matters most in an app like this. Text doesn't always flow into columns nicely, and infoboxes are hidden away in screen-stealing pop-ups.

Music Maker Jam is perhaps the only featured pick with some degree of depth. The app is a simple music sequencer, though one that relies almost entirely on preset samples (users can choose between dubstep, jazz, or tech house musical stylings). The sequencer itself boasts big, finger-friendly buttons, where users can adjust the volume of various instruments and choose from different samples, effects, and musical keys. Though limited, this is probably one of the most interesting and interactive apps currently available in the Windows Store.

Enlarge/ Windows 8 has approximately 100% more wub than previous versions.

Finally, cloud storage app Box is worth a special mention, because it is the only featured app that is designed for productivity and day-to-day use. Here is the most convincing third-party use case for Metro as a work-capable interface you'll find thus far. Not only does it have an immensely clean design that retains the Box identity with the look and feel of Metro, but it is packed with most of the functionality you'll find using the company's traditional desktop app—everything from file uploads to comments and sharing and sorting.

From here, there isn't much else to see. Amazon's Kindle app works just as you'd expect from an e-reading application, with Metro flourishes throughout the library UI. TuneIn Radio is essentially one giant app of boxes on a grid, each of which represents a streaming radio station.

Beyond the Spotlight

Beyond Microsoft's collection of featured apps, things begin to get interesting. It doesn't take long to realize why Microsoft chose to feature the apps they did—many of the Windows Store's new additions lack the design and function polish of Microsoft's feature and first-party apps. Given that Windows 8 is still months away from Release Candidate status, this is to be expected. But for the time being, there exists a certain homogeneity in app design that leaves the greater third-party experience feeling relatively uninspired.

Worse still are the apps that aren't present. While there is no shortage of games scattered across the Windows Store—they get second billing after the Store's default Spotlight screen—other categories are not quite so lucky. Sports has four apps. Books and Reference have a mere eight. You don't even need to navigate to a dedicated apps page for Health and Fitness—the only two titles available are simply featured on the Store's top-level homescreen. Oh, and while there are categories for Government and Security, Windows 8 developers have yet to create any apps for them. It's understandable that some of these categories have yet to be fully populated—by our count, there are only 207 apps in the Store, 30 of which are games—but for what is billed as a Release Preview build, it doesn't instill much confidence in the final release.

There are some gems, of course. Both Rowi and Tweetro are two very nice Twitter clients that take many of Metro's stylistic flourishes to heart (the former doesn't come close to its Windows Phone 7 counterpart). Lusso is a magazine app that boats a gorgeous UI, with the option to view issues as they would appear in print, or as or as simple text (which is easier to read than panning and swiping a digital page). 576 KByte, meanwhile, is a Hungarian-language gaming magazine that displays its article text with a similar horizontal scroll design. But such experiences can, at times, feel fleeting. The developers at the Financial Times, for example, appear to have never even heard of Metro. News apps such as Figaro, The Register, Sky News, and Newsy are remarkably similar in their grid-and-thumbnail heavy design. In fact, there is visual sameness to many recent apps included in the Release Preview store.

Enlarge/ Someone should introduce the Financial Times to a little something called Metro.

However, given the rapid improvement in application quality from Windows 8's previous public iteration, it's important not to read into these observations too deeply. There are, of course, many apps from big third-party developers that we have yet to see, with features and polish that likely won't be revealed until the last possible moment. Things will undoubtedly change.

And yet, for what is billed as a Release Preview, it's hard to ignore the Windows Store's current state. Entire categories sit near-empty, waiting to be filled, and those apps that remain are merely good, but not "great."